What even is a mainframe? I’ve been involved in software and infrastructure for 20+ years, I understand data centres, servers, services, microservices, databases, HA/SPOF, clusters and all the cloud equivalents, but never came across a mainframe. It’s almost a legend – are mainframes a real thing? What do/did they do? What’s happening to them? Where are they?
In: Engineering
Mainframes as a concept come from the era of computing that preceded the rise of personal computers (PCs) in the late 80s/early 90s. Back then computers were something you’d often only encounter inside institutions such universities or major companies, and such places might only have a single one. They weren’t devices you’d just use for everyday tasks such a word processing, but rather data processors designed to do calculations on huge sets of data and nothing else really. With maybe just one computer available in an institution with a lot of people wanting to use it, having just one workstation also was inconvenient, so there’d often be multiple Terminals spread around the place, all of which weren’t much more than a screen and keyboard that connected to the Mainframe and had no computing ability of their own.
In that sense, a Mainframe might sound like a Server, but where modern Servers are often just running generalised server operating systems (such as some flavor of Unix or Windows) that could in theory execute any program you could think of like it was a Desktop PC, Mainframes were and still are much more specialised and optimised for data processing specifially, and often more powerful than regular servers (though not quite to the level of a supercomputer).
There are still a lot of mainframes in use today, frequently because the tasks they need to carry out (such as processing all the daily financial transactions for a bank) havn’t changed significantly in decades, and its more risky to try and replace them with something entirely new (and less well-tested) than just maintaining the Mainframe. In general, modern Mainframes are engineered with an eye toward redundancy and reliability of the kind you’d want if it is important that the tasks it carries out do not fail, ever.
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